At a rally on March 11, 1970 the Strike Committee at the University at Buffalo issued an ultimatum to the university administration: "meet the strike demands by 9:00 p.m. the next day or face the outcome of a War Council." The Strike Committee demanded that the Buffalo Police leave campus, unconditional amnesty be given to all protesting students and an end to the ROTC program at UB.

Acting President Regan announced that a phased withdrawal of the Buffalo Police would begin March 17 in response.

On Thursday, March 12th, 1,000-1,500 people attended a nighttime rally on campus. Mixed among the UB students were students from other colleges, high school students and other members of the local community. The War Council began when the rally convened at Clark Gym. Demonstrators burned a bed sheet painted to resemble the American flag and chanted slogans in support of North Vietnam. Protesters then began to throw rocks, ice and other items at police officers gathered nearby.

The protesters moved from Clark Gym to Hayes Hall where they confronted 200 police who were lined up in front of the building. Both sides jeered at and taunted the other before the protesters moved on to the Themis site. Protesters threw rocks at windows at the Themis site and were confronted by 75 police officers.

Approximately 1,000 protesters returned to Hayes Hall and again confronted the 200 police officers there. Rocks were thrown by protesters at already broken Hayes Hall windows, showering nearby police with glass. At this point, a number of officers charged the crowd and began to beat protesters, members of the Peace Patrol and non-protesting bystanders.

12 people were shot and 58 people were injured. Some received treatment from Student Health Services, while others were taken by ambulances to area hospitals. Six people were arrested.

Themis was a research project conducted by faculty from the Department of Physiology and was funded by the Department of Defense.

On Sunday, March 8th, 400 Buffalo Police officers arrived on campus and began around the clock patrols.

Acting President Regan claimed that he called the police "to protect the safety and rights of individuals on campus, guard university property and arrest any violators of the injunction."

The police presence on campus reinvigorated student protests. 2,000 students and faculty (some sources say as many as 5,000) marched in a peaceful protest of the police being on campus.

On Monday, March 9th, a number of schools and departments across the university, as well as faculty and students hold votes showing their opposition to the police being on campus. Some called for Acting President Regan to resign, while others refused to hold classes until the police leave. The same day 350 students hold a mock funeral for the university, equipped with a flag draped coffin.

On Tuesday protesters held a pig roast in the fountain outside Norton Union. "Pigs off Campus" and other similar sayings were spray painted on campus buildings.

On Tuesday, February 24th, protesters staged a sit-in of a UB men's basketball game in Clark Gym, causing the game to be cancelled.

The students were supporting Black athletes in their ongoing negotiations to reform the financial aid and recruitment practices of the Division of Athletics. Four months prior, eight Black members of the UB Bulls basketball team announced they were boycotting the team. The athletes presented a list of grievances and demands and claimed that some of the players were recruited under the false assumption that their financial needs would be provided for. The Basketball team boycott was ended two days later when representatives of the Division of Athletics meet with the boycotters and agree to a three point plan.

The Buffalo Police Tactical Patrol Unit (TPU) assisted Campus Police in clearing Clark Gym. However, at this time, Campus Police could not ask for assistance from outside police forces without authorization of university administration. In turn, university administration was to consult UB's Security Task Force, a faculty/student advisory group, before granting such authorization. It is unclear who called the TPU for assistance.

On Wednesday, February 25th, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held a rally in Norton Union to discuss the Clark Gym sit-in. A spokesman for the Black athletes said they were happy with the progress of their negotiations with university administration.

After the meeting, a group of approximately 50 students decides to march to the President's Office in Hayes Hall and ask Acting President Peter Regan about who authorized the Buffalo Police to enter campus the previous night.

When denied a meeting with Regan, a number of the students threw rocks through his office window and then scatter. Some flee to Norton Union. Regan then called on Campus Police to arrest the rock throwers. Staged in Clark Gym to prevent another basketball game sit-in, Campus Police officers were wearing riot gear.

Campus Police proceeded to Norton Union and arrested three suspects.

The Buffalo Police TPU were called to help clear Norton Union of students.

On January 4th, 1970, The Avenue was raided by Buffalo Police. 94 people were kicked out of the bar, 11 people were arrested, and two lesbians were beaten up by officers.

The Avenue opened after another queer friendly space, The Tiki, which was located on Franklin and Tupper, was shut down. The owner of The Tiki, James Garrow, was denied a liquor license by the New York State Liquor Authority because he was arrested for allegedly "cruising other men." Because he was denied a liquor license, the Avenue became a gay “juice bar” and an underground center for LGBTQ people to meet.

However, the police raid permanently closed down The Avenue. Two years later it was demolished - the fate of many gay historic sites in Buffalo. The Avenue was replaced with the Frank A. Sedita City Courthouse, named for the mayor at the time, and is still standing today.

On August 19th, 1968 FBI, U.S. Marshals and Buffalo Police entered the Unitarian Universalist church on Elmwood Avenue to arrest Bruce Beyer. Beyer had been seeking sanctuary against arrest for draft evasion in the church for publicly burning his draft card since August 8th.

Outcome

Eight of Beyer's supporters were also arrested after a brief altercation with the police and federal agents. This group, later known as the Buffalo Nine, were charged with assault. Beyer was charged with failure to report for induction and assault of a federal marshal. He was found guilty of two of three counts of assault and was sentenced to three years in prison.

On March 19th, hundreds gathered in Lafayette Square in Buffalo to protest the sentencing and burn an effigy of the presiding judge. When nine University at Buffalo students were arrested, the protesters moved to the UB campus.

On 14 July 1967, Black anarchist of Puerto Rican descent, Martin Sostre, was arrested at his Afro-Asian Bookstore in Buffalo, New York and charged with “sale of narcotics, riot, arson, and assault.”

Sostre, who previously described himself as a “street dude, a hustler” became politically active during a period of incarceration. Upon his release, he got a job as a steelworker and saved up to open a radical bookshop.

The bookstore attracted student radicals as well as neighborhood youth. During the rebellions of 1967, it became a refuge and base. Several weeks after the uprising, police and the FBI raided Sostre’s shop and framed him with a $15 bag of heroin using an informant.

Sostre faced an exorbitant bail and languished in jail for eight months before being forced to represent himself when a judge suddenly rushed the case to trial. There, he challenged potential white jurors about their feelings on integration. “I don’t see any black faces" (there were no potential black jurors), he said. “I want to be tried by my peers.” He spoke out against the twin evils of racism and militarism before eventually being handcuffed and gagged a year before it happened to Bobby Seale in Chicago. Sostre tried to hand his legal appeal to the judge on his way out of the courtroom, raised his fist, and told the audience to “keep resisting.”

Over the next eight years, Sostre appealed his case while also winning landmark legal victories over political censorship, solitary confinement, and the rights of prisoners to due process. He also organized chapters of the Black Panther Party and prisoners’ labor unions, established radical study groups and lending libraries, and published several revolutionary newspapers. During the final years of his incarceration, he identified as a revolutionary anarchist and refused to shave his ¼ inch beard or submit to mandatory rectal “searches.” For refusing these state-sanctioned sexual assaults, he was beaten nearly a dozen times. Finally, after having been named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and with the support of defense committees across the world, his sentence was commuted by Governor Hugh Carey on Christmas Day 1975.

“For me this is a continuous struggle whether I am on the outside or the inside,” Sostre announced. “If the battlefield changes, my struggle never changes.” He continued to organize, leading tenant's rights efforts in Harlem and co-founding a group called the Juvenile Education and Awareness Project (JEAP) with Sandy Shevack in New Jersey. JEAP combined jobs training with political education and youth mentorship, and over the course of nearly a decade, the group employed nearly 100 teenagers to renovated five buildings, transforming these abandoned properties into a community center, daycare, and apartments rented for below market price.

Martin Sostre passed away on August 12, 2015 at the age of 92. At the height of his international prominence, radical attorney William Kunstler remembered Sostre as a “Promethean figure, a hero to other inmates and to ourselves. He should not even have been in jail, but while he was, the state did all it could to destroy what it could not destroy – his indomitable will.”

Today, the Martin Sostre Institute continues his legacy.

Source: the Martin Sostre Institute

While playing basketball with friends, two young residents got into a physical altercation. Buffalo Police arrived on the scene to break it up, and one of the young men informed the cops that there was no need to intervene. “We fight every day and we would be friends the next day,” explained the young man. Despite his attempts to de-escalate what he believed to be a non-threatening situation, the police soon spiraled out of control.

Two police quickly multiplied to thirty as residents gathered around the unfolding scene. At one point, an officer even drove his motorcycle through the crowd of boys as the remaining police ordered the by-standers to return to their homes. Irate that the reckless officer had hit their sons, two mothers and a reverend approached the officers. They had underestimated the hostility of the police.

An attempt to address one incident of violence instigated even more physical abuse as the officers lashed out at the residents who dared to confront them. According to community members, “Two more Police officers came and they tried to arrest Rev. Bryant, pulled a gun on him, hit one of the mothers in the head, and then again the Precinct #10 cops came, riot ready—pulling their guns out, swinging their sticks at us and telling us to go home.”

Community Response

After the Police Violence that community experienced, community members initially went home and waited until about midnight until folks went out with the intention of causing property damage. There may not have appeared to be much damage on the first night, however the visceral reaction to over policing and brutality in the Lakeview Project was not confined to the West Side of Buffalo.

The chaos spread like wildfire onto the East Side where most of the Black population resided. The very next night after Molotov cocktails exploded on the West Side, the Buffalo Evening News reported that the East Side convulsed under the weight of vandalism, fires, and looting. On Tuesday June 27th, eight people were reported injured, nine fires were set ablaze, and an estimated twenty-three people were arrested.

According to some, Mayor Sedita was partially responsible for the disturbances that were taking place because of joblessness, poor housing, and a lack of recreational facilities. “The power structure in Buffalo has contributed as much as any other factor to the disturbance in the past three nights by their indifference to the needs of all its citizens,” remarked Rev. Milton A. Williams, the President of the NAACP Buffalo Chapter. He railed against: “…the retailers who have refused over the years to hire Negroes in numbers comparable to the number of Negroes in the community…A mayor who permits his departments to operate recreational areas in a most deplorable condition which mirrors the contempt of the white community for this area…A Board of Education and the head of our School Department who claim insight and concern for the poor area schools but who failed to provide $50,000 for the operation of the public school playgrounds in a $51 Million budget.”

The Democratic Nominating Convention opened September 7th, 1966 at Memorial Auditorium, in downtown Buffalo. Vice President Humphrey arrived the following morning. His visit was protested by Youth Against War and Fascism. As the anti-war demonstrators silently picketed Memorial Auditorium, two participants, Victor Aronow and Jeanette Merrill, were arrested. They complied peacefully and were taken to police headquarters.

Reform Democrat delegates from New York City who witnessed the arrests approached permanent convention chairman Percy Sutton at the noon recess and threatened to raise the issue on the convention floor. They argued that the public was invited by all delegates to the convention and the arrests were a violation of this invitation.

Mayor Sedita, then still hopeful of the nomination for lieutenant governor, acted quickly to prevent the threatened action. Mayor Sedita apologized personally to the demonstrators and called a special city court session to dismiss the charges.

Mrs. Merrill, charged with resisting arrest, refusing to comply with the reasonable request of an officer and using profanity, stated: “I was not guilty of anything I was arrested for, as is the case with all anti-war demonstrators . . . this is not an isolated incident. I was the victim today. They are carrying out a policy from above which is political in character."

Buffalo Police officer Edward B. Wisniewski Jr of Fillmore Station. shot Stevenson McDuffie, a 16 year old Black boy, as he ran from a patrol car. He was shot in the upper right thigh and left shoulder. According to Officer Wisniewski and his partner, Officer Edmund Dukat, they were responding to a reported theft of a purse which contained $2.

Outcome

Two felony charges were placed against 16 year old Stevenson McDuffie—second degree grand larceny and attempted escape. McDuffie pled Not Guilty to the charges in his hospital room. City Judge Joseph Mattina, who went to the hospital for the arraignment set bail at $1,000.

Officer Wisniewski was put on temporary leave and was exonerated by Commissioner Felicetta of any wrongdoing. Felicetta turned his findings over to District Attorney Michael Dillion for presentation to a grand jury.

Community Response

Civil rights leaders and leaders representing CORE and NAACP demanded the suspension of Officer Wisniewski, called for a public hearing of the case, and criticized the handling of the case by Mayor Frank Sedita and Police Commissioner Frank Felicetta.

Donald R Lee, president of the NAACP, said the police department's investigation of the August 3 shooting "completely shocked the organization by its obvious attempt to whitewash the shooting." Samuel L Green, counsel for CORE, described the case as "police brutality" and charged that Felicetta's "private investigation" did not answer why the officer "had to shot McDuffie." Green said that Felicetta did not call for testimony of citizens who may have been witnesses to the shooting. David Collins, president of the Neighborhood(Ellicott) Advisory Council, Community Action Organization, said: "I feel if we don't take a stand on this, it will be the same thing over and over again." One leader urged that the incident be settled promptly before, "a powder keg explodes." The leaders approved a letter which was sent to Gov. Rockefeller asking him to investigate the case and authorized civil rights leaders to schedule picketing of City Hall to demonstrate their protest of the McDuffie case.

On Saturday, January 8, Vice President Hubert Humphrey visited Buffalo and during his stay spoke at a banquet at the Statler Hilton commemorating one thousand years of Christianity in Poland. His presence in Buffalo prompted local peace groups, under the sponsorship of the Buffalo Youth Against War and Fascism, to hold a demonstration in front of the hotel aimed at highlighting their opposition to the war in Viet Nam and particularly their opposition to certain public statements Vice President Humphrey had made in connection with the war.

The demonstration had been in progress for over an hour when four of the demonstrators left the line and entered the hotel "just to warm up.” Daniel Katz, one of the four who went to warm up, was approached by Buffalo Detective Joseph A. Schwartz and was told to leave. A scuffle and ensued and Katz was arrested for "refusing to accede to the reasonable request of an officer."

Katz later complained of rough treatment at the hands of please, both in the hotel and on the way to the station, and stated that Schwartz, who is in plain clothes, never identified himself as an officer and that Katz had never been informed that he was under arrest.

Katz was charged with disorderly conduct and attempting to enter the elevator in which Vice President Humphrey was riding. The judge on the case later dismissed the later charge on the basis of contradictory testimony of the prosecution witness. However, the judge refused the motion by a defense attorney Richard Lipsitz for dismissal on the grounds of conflicting prosecution testimony.

When asked his reaction after the trial, Katz stated, "I feel that the actions of the arresting officers were an intimidations of the peace movement, the civil rights movement, and any other movement which actively dissents from the status quo."

Katz was convicted on January 27 and fined $25.

Buffalo Police arrested 34 in a brutal raid in the William-Pine, East Ferry-Michigan area on the evening on September 11, 1954 in the largest anti-Black attack in years. The roundup was ordered by Commissioner Noeppel, allegedly because of complaints that loungers refused to break up and let pedestrians pass.

Eight of those arrested were youths from 16 to 19 years old. In court they were told by the tough-talking judge that now they would have a police record, which would go on their army service record or disqualify them for civil service jobs.

Among the police victims was a Black minister, Rev. Leroy Anderson, pastor of the Church of God in Christ, Lackawanna, and member of the Lackawanna City Planning Commission. Mr. Anderson, describing the high-handed Buffalo police methods, vile language, and brutality, said he planned to sue the city for false arrest. Mr. Anderson was about to enter a store when he was ordered into a patrol wagon with, "Come on, you go too, you bastard!" When he protested at the language, he was told, "When I get you to Number Six (the police station) I'll do more than that to you." He heard one of the other men arrested on the corner cry out when a policeman struck him.

Most of the other people reported similar treatment. The police hauled in about four loads, grabbing them at random off the street. One man was picked up as he got out of his car to ask a policeman what was wrong. Another was arrested on his way to work.

At the station, a cop told the people, "Just shut your mouth. If you're quiet, you won't get in trouble."

Outcome

The judge was just as vicious as were the commissioner and the police. He denied the Rev. Anderson the right to provide his own bail, committing him to a cell for the night along with the others who were arrested. The judge calling the people before him "bums," he told them that because of their conduct it was not safe for "respectable citizens” and "daughters" to walk down the street.

At the time of the arrests, aroused people formed until the crowd reached some 300. News of the police outrage spread quickly through the city and protests were heard in the Black churches the next day.

In the morning of Oct. 10. 1953 two young workers, Norman and James Daniels, were unmerciful beat of by six club-happy Buffalo Police Officers . . . a beating which continued in two police vehicles en route to the jail. Both men were hospitalized with severe injuries.

42 members of the Communist Party of Buffalo had been arrested by Buffalo Police, Mrs. Dr. Anna Reinstein, wife of Boris Reinstein, being the last victim. Mrs. Reinstein and 10 others were released on bail.

Frank M. Cassidy was ordered released by Justice Charles B. Sears on the ground that the information against him was not properly drawn up. But as Cassidy left the court he was rearrested on new information drawn by Walter P. Hofheins, of the District Attorney’s office.

The new information alleged that Cassidy “is feloniously and a member of a certain unlawful society commonly known as the Communist Party, organized and existing for the purpose of teaching and advocating the doctrine of criminal anarchy and among other things, the overthrown of organized government by force and violence.”